rugs I lazily regarded this titanic pile of weather-beaten stone, I was aware of a mystic change. Like the smoke that issued from the vase when Solomon's seal was broken, the gigantic pillar at our side slowly assumed the semblance-nor yet the semblance only of a human form. I was not surprised; it seemed only right and fitting that the Titan who, during the primeval conflict of elemental forces, wide western ocean; and before the wind went down we had passed the Kaim of Hoy, and St. John's Head, and the long buttress of cliff which was raised no doubt to prevent the islands from being swept bodily away by the Atlantic rollers. We had not counted, however, upon an absolute calm, and had meant to return with the tide. But when we were told after our evening meal that we must wait where we were for the morning breeze, it did not had been turned into stone, should be occur to us to complain. The night was too exquisite for sleep-for sleep at least under a slated roof. The balmy air of the Gulf Stream was about us. Wrapped in our rugs, we could scan the mighty crags and watch for the moon to rise. Too exquisite for sleep; and yet I must have dozed; for when I looked again the moon was high in heaven. permitted to converse with the representative of a later race. In that illusive light, indeed, nothing was incredible, -nothing too weird and extravagant for belief. Certum est quia impossibile est, I said to myself, as Sir Thomas Browne had said before me, and Tertullian before Sir Thomas Browne. The voice was low and placid and passionless,- serene with the serenity of an immeasurable past. I did not dare at first to interrupt the monologue, which began in a speech as unknown to me as the gurgle of the guillemots. There was not a breath of air in the sky or on the water. The ocean was flooded with pallid moonlight; the heat of the day had been converted into a For he did not notice us transparent mista mist of ghostly for a time; he was looking across the transfiguration-through which, as in sea, straight across to Newfoundland, a dream or through a veil, we saw the whence the sunset had struck age after solid earth. There was no sound save age upon his upturned face; and "the that of the moving waters "at their large utterance of the early gods," priest-like task," -the tide that softly which had grown quite archaic before lapped the iron bases of the hills. Homer was born, was doubtless his natimes, indeed, a murmur came from tive tongue. The Gaelic of the Garden the rocks where in solid ranks thou- of Eden, the Norse of Odin's Walhalla, sands of parrots and marrots sat beside can still be construed by scholars; but their nests. It was the first watch of Thea and Saturn are dumb. .It could night; but midnight was at hand. All not well be otherwise, perhaps; foron board were asleep except myself to judge from what I heard that night and one seaman at the stern who idly the language they used must have handled the tiller. We were drifting had more affinity with the sough of the slowly with the tide, no doubt; but the wind and the ripple of the stream than progress was inappreciable. A phan- with articulate words. tom ship upon a phantom ocean! But after a while he appeared to beMighty precipices hundreds of feet in come conscious that he was no longer height rose out of the water- a bow- alone, and that a monologue in a dead shot from us on our right. The moon- language was out of place, and indeed light did not touch them; did not at barely civil. It may be true that Titans least pierce the gloom of the dark fis- are not naturally communicative; but sures and caverns into which the seals for ten or twelve thousand years he stole noiselessly as we passed. Only had led a life of extreme seclusion; the Old Man of Hoy stood out clear and the sociable instinct is deeply against the sky-clean-cut as by a seated. How it came about I cannot knife. But even while wrapped in my exactly undertake to explain; but ere many minutes had passed I found my- | incalculable; and yet no experienc self, as matter of fact, engaged in am- will convince the overwhelming ma icable conversation with my gigantic jority that the life of storm and stres neighbor, a conversation devoted on which they have entered, and fron mainly to the more striking incidents which they cannot escape, is not worth of his long, if not varied, career. Much living. Whence comes that seed of day of the conversation is lost — irrevocably which forces them to persevere, and lost; but a few fragments cling to the which the most bitter frost canno memory. kill?" creatures (if I might without impro priety use the word) were about. The interchange of the customary I looked at him anxiously; I wa civilities was followed by the usual re- afraid that his observations, ostensibly marks upon the inclemency of the confined though they were to the par weather. By mutual consent, implied rots and marrots, might have a wide rather than expressed, anything in the application. But there was no irony in nature of political controversy was his tone, no cynicism on his lip; and avoided, and Mr. Gladstone's name ventured to remark that when the was not even mentioned. The conver-breeding season was over, and the bird; b sation might consequently have flagged had scattered, he had possibly had had we not accidentally discovered a leisure to observe what his fellow topic of common interest. We were both naturalists; and the sea-birds with whom he had cultivated friendly relations, and who treated him with the most absolute confidence, had been my special study. He had known the great auk intimately, and regretted his untimely end. (I promised, by the way, to let him have Harvie Brown's monograph.) But the king was never, he said, the same bird after his wife's death, and had told him, indeed, that he did not care to live. He could not honestly say that he missed the whitetailed eagle (who had deserted his eyrie a year ago); for, though a gentlemanly bird of good family, he was a bit of a glutton, and his relations with the lesser gulls were strained, and led to constant unpleasantness. "Yes," he continued thoughtfully "I have seen something of them. The races of men that make haste to de struction! But they do not interest me much- as little indeed as the mott notonous procession of the seasons. have, however, more than once talked over their prospects with my good friend and neighbor, the Dragon o Maeshowe, who is a shrewd judge of character, though his field of observa tion, no doubt, has been comparatively limited. When I first came here," he went on, and the much to easy life, fish were plentiful, and the weather was fine. We have no such summers now as we had then, and salmon and sea-trout have become comparatively scarce. Indeed the sal mon, I hear, has left us for good. That golden age of peace and plenty came to an end when the first boatload of bearded rovers was driven by stress of weather upon our shores. These sailed away and brought back others -men and women who bred and mul tiplied - yea, multiplied exceedingly. That," he concluded, "is the whole story a story as tedious as it is trivial." some mons ago, the scrath phoca had the islands pretty themselves. They led ar "What amazes me most," he went on, "is the freshness of interest which the numberless generations of marrots and parrots I have known contrive to maintain. My brisk little neighbors never lose heart. They continue to lay their eggs summer after summer with an intrepid faith in the future that never fails them. One would have fancied that by this time they might have come to see that the game was not worth the candle. The father and mother birds have seldom opportunity to hatch more than a brood or two before they are cut off; and how many of the chicks sur- "But," I interrupted, "consider the vive? The perils of the deep are progress that has been made !" "What is progress?" he responded. turned us out of heaven. “As it does not occur in the vocabu- But you and know how Zeus behaved himself, what kind of place Olympus became ? Be sure that the sheep-dog is still a wolf at heart. With the least encouragement the native savageness will assert itself. Paris, they tell me, is the centre of your civilization, and yet you will hardly deny that the Parisian petroleuse is just the wild-cat over again. The puzzle, my ingenuous young friend, is as old as the hills. "That will do," he replied gravely; Evolution can only evolve; it does not "I shall not trouble you further. I create. How are you to get out of find that in effect the phrase must have yourself? Can the Ethiopian change been in use ever since I can remem- his skin, or the leopard his spots ? ber anything. Even in these remote What you call progress is merely the islands it is a household word. You change of manners due to bit and have seen my friend Cursiter's museum bridle, to the scavenger and the policeof Orcadian antiquities? So you know man; the essential element, the domisomething of our history. We have nant and determining factor, remains had the flint age, and the bronze age, the same. The tide of mortal affairs and the age of Maeshowe and the is like the tide of the ocean; by an inStones of Stennis, and the devout mediæval age which built the great church at St. Olaf, and the modern secular age which built the squalid little barn in which, if I am not mistaken, you sat last Sunday. But what has come of it all? Do you mean to tell me that you are happier or handier or wiser all round than the men who shaped the flints and hammered the bronze ? Only consider what invention and inge-gotten, and his tendencies to self-asnuity were required to light the first sertion are dignified by the name of fire, to wing the first arrow, to fashion rights ?” the first frying-pan, to boil the first leg of mutton. Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte when the initial difficulty has been overcome, you are within measurable distance of the printing-press and the spinning-jenny." variable law the flood is followed by the ebb. Huxley-if it be the Huxley I knew when speech was pellucid as the mountain spring, and logic cut like a sword-will tell you as much; for Huxley, like myself, is a survival. Has he not confessed indeed that you have reached the stage the fatal stage in national life - when the duties of the individual to the State are for "But Mr. Huxley admits that the ethical force will prove superior to the cosmic, and that the return to the ruthless and unscrupulous struggle for existence which we call barbarism. He shrugged his shoulders (or was it only an optical delusion ?), and I fancied that I heard a contemptuous whistle, which, however, may have come from a half-awakened curlew, for the dawn was at hand. "True," I answered; "but on the ethical side you must surely admit (if you are not an absolute pagan)" I could see that he winced at the implication "that we have outstripped our fathers. The rapacious instinct has "Even your most lucid thinker canbeen subdued. The wolf who worried not escape from his environment,' the sheep has been tamed into the he answered; and then he added— sheep-dog. That is what Professor" Neither you nor he, indeed, can be Huxley maintains." expected to recognize and appreciate as "That, too, was the contention of I do the essential truth of what one of Zeus and the younger gods when they your own poets has said: 4320 He might not :- No, though a primeval God; That Sabbath day was long memorable to us. The breeze that wafted us The Sacred Seasons might not be dis- slowly along the coast had come with turbed." He was exasperatingly cool, and I was rather nettled; so I said slowly, looking him straight in the face, " Do you mean to assure me, my venerable friend, on your word of honor, as a Titan and a philosopher, that there is nothing new under the sun?” "Well," said the Old Man, after a prolonged pause (it may be that he was wearied by my pertinacity), “it is possible that I am doing you less than justice. I beg your pardon. But it is only of late years-only the other day, indeed that my attention has been directed to a practice for which in my experience no precedent can be found. The art is distinctively modern, if not characteristically English. In this respect I am ready to admit that you have not been anticipated. Look there!" he exclaimed, pointing to the opposite bluff, on which in monstrous characters a facile but audacious brush had inscribed these words: Pratt's Little Liver Pills. BUNTINE'S POWDER FOR BUGS. Thoms's Soft Soap IS THE BEST. TRY OUR CASTOR OIL. The day was breaking ere I had spelt out the last word, and when I turned to the Old Man, "There is a breeze in the offing," said the skipper, touching his cap. "We shall have it directly. We did not care to waken you, Mr. Shirley; but, now that the tide has turned, we shall be at Stromness in an hour."' 1 1 We may gather from the report of a conversation in the House of Commons the other day, that the art to which the Old Man of Hoy referred is cultivated over a wide area : "Mr. Boulnois asked the president of the Board of Agriculture whether he could take any steps to prevent the face of the country being disfigured by the advertisements of vendors of quack medicines? the Gulf Stream from tropical islands, and was soft and mellow. Stromness was only half-awake when we passed into Scapa Flow; a purple haze rested on the hills of Hoy; and though now and again we saw a group of country people on their way to church, and though far off there was a clamor of sea-gulls, the peace was absolute and unbroken. The beatific hush of the seventh day had fallen upon us. Nature, like man, was at rest from her labors. Even the shy wild birds knew that they were safe-safe while the brief truce lasted. Eiderduck and black guillemot, too lazy to fly, too confident to dive, looked the "auld enemy" fearlessly in the face. It was growing dark before we dropped our anchor beside the Chapel of the Rock. The service was closing; they were singing their evening hymu. It is a hymn made solely for pastoral and seafaring people who are sorely tried by wind and evil weather, and has no place in the authorized mainland version. "The E'en brings a' Hame," they call it (after the beautiful old proverb), and it is set to Mendelssohn's music : 2. "Mr. H. Gardner said that, speaking from the æsthetic standpoint only, he shared the views of the honorable member in regard to the inartistic: results of the practice in question; but he had no power to interfere. He could not say he was surprised to find the owners and occupiers of agricultural land should, under existing circumstances, be unable to resist the temptation held out to them by advertising contractors. (Laughter.) cultivating crops of pictorial and other advertise "Mr. Boulnois asked whether, if farmers took to ments, the right honorable gentleman would consider the advisability of introducing a controlling rural districts might be preserved ? and regulating bill in order that the amenities of "Mr. H. Gardner said he was not prepared to ad mit that the authority of the Board of Agriculture extended over the face of the country.' Nor was he quite sure that the duties of the Board involved the restraining of advertisements of this kind. (Laughter.)" Mr. Huxley does not doubt that "some day we shall arrive at an understanding of the evolution of the aesthetic faculty;" it is to be regretted that that understanding has not yet been officially arrived at, and that the minister of agriculture is: in the mean time "powerless to interfere." 2 Adagio non troppo in E major, from the "Lieder ohne worte." 15 Man of Hoy, who is certainly still there? rumors to the contrary, I am bound to Though there have been malicious say that our G. O. M. (as we came to call him in the freedom of family intercourse) was scrupulously polite. The vexed question of “bracing air,” which Where the brown lichen whitens, and the has been the cause of so much domes fox Watches the straggler from the scattered flocks; But evening brings us home. The sharp thorns prick us, and our tender When evening brings us home. We have been wounded by the hunter's darts. Our eyes are very heavy, and our hearts Search for thy coming, when the light departs At evening bring us home. It was only a coincidence, no doubt; but I said to myself, as we pulled the dingy ashore, that I had somehow found an answer to the gloomy vaticinations of the Titan. SHIRLEY OF BALMAWHAPPLE. which we seriously disagreed; and the tic dissension, was the only one on slight misunderstanding was speedily composed. "You are still at the Hermitage ?" he said. I admitted that we were. "Don't you find it damp ?" he inquired, in the tone one employs when addressing the victim of chronic rheumatism. I was tempted to point out that his own position (in ten fathoms of water) could hardly be called dry; but I forbore. 66 "Yes," The moan of doves in immemorial elms, It is only fair to add that the Old Man's familiarity with modern English literature was highly creditable. Cheap editions of our standard poets circulate in these northern parts, and to them he may have had access; but by what route an early copy of Mr. Huxley's reP.S. It has been insinuated, I cent discourse on evolution and ethics know, that the conversation, which I had reached him, I am unable to exhave endeavored to record to the best plain. He is obviously a warm admirer my ability, did not in point of fact of that pre-eminently lucid writer; take place, and that the existence of though he is mistaken, I fancy, the delusion (delusion, forsooth!) may holding that Mr. Huxley is nothing if be traced to a more or less hazy remi- not critical. One who is a critic only niscence of a reported interview with a could not have written such a sentence mummy. But if you can converse with as this: a mummy who has been dead for thousands of years, why not with the Old of in I venture to count it an improbable suggestion that any such person -a man, let |